Sugar and spice…granny smith

Take one granny smith. Cut it into half. Use one half to make a spicy mint chutney and the other to make a dessert filling.

Well let’s start with the spicy mint and apple chutney using a recipe from An Indian Housewife’s Recipe Book . This uses a combination of mint, apple, onion, chillies and some spices to make a chutney. I didn’t have enough mint and was in no mood to blow my head off with the amount of chilies in the recipe. So what I ended up with, whilst still very spicy, was a bit watery. We had it at dinner tonight with some black pepper papads but I’m afraid it was a bit blah.  I’ve stuck it in the fridge and will see how it tastes tomorrow.

That left me with half a granny smith. Well sugar with spice is a bit nice. So I decided to chop the apples up, bung them in a pan with a spoonful of sugar and a smattering of cinnamon.

  

Whilst the apple stewed, I waltzed over to the freezer and took out some ready made vol-au-vents. These are the simplest things to use, heat the oven, brush edges of cases with milk or egg, cook for 15-17 minutes turning halfway through. Unfortunately, sometimes simple is still too complicated. I mean what does turn me – rotate or flip over? Anyhoooo, the first batch burnt. I blame it on our new non-fan electric oven that has a rather odd smell to it. The second batch worked out just fine. After they were cooled, I loaded them up with the apple sauce and put the back in the oven to stay warm …the oven though off would take a long time to cool down.

And the result….Absolutely delicious served with some Mackies vanilla ice-cream which offset the sour apple filling just perfectly. Will definitely be making those again.

Baked plaintain

I am sooooo glad that I decided to give plaintain another shot. In the past, I’ve unsuccessfully managed to fry it in a pan West Indian style. However, when popping into the local Morrissons, I couldn’t resist picking a large plaintain up. I’m pretty chuffed that this branch is selling “ethnic” foodstuffs so am trying to keep encouraging them by buying stuff.

A quick google took me to the Oven Baked Sweet Plantains recipe. I’m not a huge fan of cooking sprays as they seem to leave a residue on the pan that ruins it. However, reading through the comments, I liked the idea of olive oil and also coating the baked goods with sugar and cinnamon. The results were a tasty little treat good for either after dinner or an quick sweet snack.

Ingredients:

 

• One plantain, ends chopped off, peeled then flesh sliced diagonally
• Enough olive oil to cover the plantain in an oven proof dish
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 dessert spoon icing sugar

Cooking:

• So easy. Preheat oven to 200 degrees (less if using a fan oven)
• Place plaintain in an oven proof dish and toss about with olive oil until well covered
• Cook for about 15/20 minutes. Half way through turn the pieces
• Once cooked, remove from oven an allow to cool (unlike me who left them in while we ate dinner and they burnt slightly)
• Once cool enough to touch, toss in cinnamon and icing sugar

Dudhi halwa (bottle gourd pudding)

I like puddings that have vegetables in them – showing the sweet side of their nature. It also makes me feel I’m getting one of my five-a-day (ignoring all the sweet stuff). A classic is carrot cake. Or in India, carrot halwa which is a sweet pudding made from carrots, sugar, milk and a few other ingredients. I normally eat bottle gourd (known as “dudhi” in Gujarati) as a shak/curry. Occasionally, if I add chick pea lentils it can be a delicious dal. Yesterday I decided to try out an Indian dessert called Dudhi Halwa tweaking the recipe slightly to make a smaller amount .

Indian desserts are hardly ever good for you – they often contain sugar, clarified butter (ghee), milk and khoya which is made from buffalo milk and is a creamy ingredient. This is no exception – however, as it’s so sweet, you are unlikely to have too much. And anyway, a treat every now and then keeps a girl happy.

Once again, I apologise for the blurred images. Must must MUST sort out my camera soon. Hope you can see OK.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup bottle gourd. Peel hard skin off, finely grate the flesh. If yours has seeds in it, remove these before grating. 1 cup is roughly half a dudhi – I put the other cup of grated dudhi in the freezer as an experiment.
• 1 cup full fat milk
• 2 tbs clarified butter / ghee (see prep below)
• 1 cardamom dry roasted then powdered in a pestle and mortar (discard the outer skin, pound black seeds only)
• 2 tbs caster sugar (granulated would do just as well but as caster sugar is finer, it dissolved faster).
• For garnish – 4 almonds. Soaked in hot water, then remove skin and cut into thin slivers. Also use pistachios if you have them which you just simply slice into slivers.

Preparation:

• At some point I will do a post on making ghee at home. However, for the pudding I cheated. I put 20g of anchor butter in a small point and brought to heat. When the salt had separated, I took off the heat. Then carefully poured out the clarified butter leaving the salt in the pot.

Method:

Method – as per original recipe. Copied below for convenience. Blurred photos are all mine I’m afraid.

   

1. Heat a heavy bottom pan over medium heat, add ghee.
2. Add grated doodhi and saute until it turns translucent.
3. Add the milk and bring to boil.
4. Simmer for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
5. When halwa is almost dry, add sugar, mix well.
6. Stir continuously until moisture has evaporated.
7. Turn off the heat and add cardamom powder, mix well.
8. Garnish with sliced almonds and pista, Serve.

Home-made gulab jamun – the cheat’s way

Yesterday was Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. For all Hindus and Sikhs too, Diwali goes hand in hand with gorgeous festival food both savoury and sweet.

I had a full meal planned and wanted to make a home-made sweet. In India a lot of sweets are made with khoya which is dried buffalo milk. I tried to get some from Laverstock farm but alas they only sell it in wholesale quantities at the mo and there is NO way we would eat that many sweets. So the next best thing….CHEAT using the Gits Gulab Jamun 200g mix which I bought from Tesco!!!

Was really keen to get started so didn’t read the instructions properly. I didn’t find the video until just now. Despite putting in milk in carefully, I ended up with a horrible wet mess. Luckily I’d bought some milk powder so stuck that in. Then my little daughter wanted to help form the balls but damn, they were so crumbly and the poor girl was put off. I added a bit of water and Ta DAH it all came together in a lovely dough. I formed balls but didn’t get the 40 stated in the pack because  I like my balls big (oooeeerrr missus). I fried them to a golden colour but next time, I’m going to let them go darker. The next crisis was when I read how much sugar was needed for the syrup. But hey ho, made the syrup and soaked the balls. Some of the balls fell apart, but the ones that didn’t taste absolutely delicious served warm (syrup was still very warm an hour after making it) with Mackie’s Vanilla ice-cream.  A wonderful Indian Scottish combination methinks.

Plum and rhubarb crumble

In the past I have made Louise Pickford’s Rhubarb, Apple and Double Ginger crumble (in the Hamlyn’s Vegetarian Cooking book) with mixed results. I think the problem is that I use a smaller pie dish than the recipe calls for so it always feels like I have too much crumble topping. I also find the amount of ginger a bit heavy. So today I amended the recipe, making less crumble and adding some plums to the mix. Again the results were mixed. It was still very ginger-y and the plums got lost in the flavours of that and the tart rhubarb. But with a bit of custard, it was very tasty indeed and perfect for the kind of autumnal day we had today in Central Scotland.

Ingredients:

Filling

• 400g rhubarb trimmed and cut into 2inch pieces
• 1tbs chopped preserved stem ginger (was very strong, next time will use 1/2 tbs)
• 40g golden caster sugar
• 6tbs water
• 300g plums – stone and sliced

Crumble

• 100g plain flour
• 40g ginger biscuits – crushed
• 20g Scottish porridge oat
• 50g butter
• 3 tablespoons Demerara sugar

To make the filling

• Discard rhubarb leaves, wash the stems and cut them into 2inch pieces and place in a large pan
• Chop the stem ginger into tiny pieces (believe me you need them small as getting a chunk of ginger is not pleasant). Add to the pan
• Wash then stone the plums. Chop up the flesh (with skin on….oooh that sounds so gruesome!) and put into the pan with the rhubarb, ginger, sugar and water
• Simmer for 10 minutes
• Once cooked placed in a greased oven-proof dish.

Making the crumble

• Put flour in a medium-sized bowl, and stir in the crushed ginger biscuits and oats.
• Rub in the butter until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs
• Stir in sugar and combine well

Putting it all together

• Pre-heat oven to 190 degrees
• Spread half of the crumble mixture onto the stewed fruits and cook in the oven for 10 minutes
• Spread rest of crumble mixture onto the crumble/fruit and cook until the mixture is bubble and the topping is golden. About 40 minutes

Serve warm with custard, vanilla ice-cream or a spoonful of single cream

Easy chocolate mousse

I do love chocolate mousse but all that cream gives my heart a huge roundhouse kick.  So I was intrigued when I came across an Ellie Kreiger show where she was making Chocolate Mousse….with silken tofu! I didn’t have any dutch processed cocoa powder so opted for a much simpler Veg Mousse pudding using a 100g block of Green and Black’s Maya Gold chocolate (a delicious orange infused dark chocolate).

This is the first time I’ve used silken tofu and the first time I’ve had a tofu pudding – the end result was grainy. The taste was nice and light though you wouldn’t mistake it for a real mousse.  Hubby decided it tasted better when eaten with a huge dollop of vanilla ice-cream. Tomorrow we will have the remaining 2 ramekins with some raspberries. As far as puddings go, this was a success and I’m also now tempted to try the Kreiger recipe…assuming I can get the right kind of cocoa powder.

P.S. Do not, like me, be tempted to taste the tofu on it’s own. It’s gross and very offputting.

Some images of my progress:

This is the Mori Nu firm silken tofu which I was surprisinginly able to buy in the local Asda.

I squished the tofu between sheets of kitchen towel for 10 minutes to squeeze water out.

I used an electric whisk to whizz the tofu but in future will do it for longer and then pass it through a sieve to make the end result less grainy.

Once the melted chocolate is blended in, I spooned the mixture into 4 ramekins, covered in cling film and placed them in the fridge to firm up.

Update 29th Aug

Today we had the last 2 ramikins with raspberries and ice-cream. Very yummy. So in future, I think I’ll use the mousse as the filling for a cheesecake.

RND’11 Butter fudge and Coconut ice

Well I have to say, I’m pretty pleased with myself. I’ve also got aching muscles in my right arm from stirring, stirring and stirring the fudge made using Jamie Oliver’s Monster Bake Butter Fudge. Now, here is me thinking fudge should be hard but nooooooooooo hubby assures me it should not harden. Phew as the stuff was squidy. One thing I would say is if you are going to make the stuff, then line the tray with greaseproof paper or clingfilm as I just couldn’t get it out of the tin easily and ended up with rather odd-looking shapes. However, a bit of origami and a bit of ribbon can disguise anything. We are not a household much bothered about shapes all we care about is taste and this stuff is DELICIOUS. Together with the Hope and Greenwood recipe coconut ice the fudge makes a wonderful addition to our bake sale.

Other things on offer will be L’s victoria sponge and her Jamie Oliver chocolate fudge cake, E’s chocolate and blueberry cookies plus her yummy lemon butter biscuits, and for the kiddies to get their hands on some lovely strawberry smelling homemade playdough from J.

Lime and kiwi cheesecake

I recently (re)discovered that hubby likes cheesecake. This was news to me even though we both chose to have the most divine lime pie at our wedding. I decided to have a bash at creating my own version using the delicious Raspberry and Chocolate Cheesecake as inspiration (I made this a few weeks ago it was awesome, I forgot to write it up). Now you skinny Minnies out there, don’t think of the calories, just tuck in – you can always go jogging tomorrow (or in my case Zumba!)

Ingredients

• 200g digestive biscuits smashed to crumbs
• 2 tsp / 1 blob of stem ginger cut very finely  (if you don’t have any, use 100g disgestives and 75g ginger nuts instead)
• 2tsp  sugar syrup from stem ginger
• 60g melted butter
• 300g full fat Philadelphia (cream cheese) softened
• 200ml double cream
• 75g granulated sugar
• zest and juice of a large lime
• 2 kiwis

Equipment

• a spring loose round tin or flan dish
• 2 large bowls
• A wooden spoon and some muscles

Preparation

• Once you have pulverised the biscuits to very fine crumbs add in the chopped stem ginger and syrup. Mix very well. I used my hands (clean of course) but if you are so lucky, do it in a food processor.
• Add the melted butter to the mix and stir until it’s combined
• Put the biscuit mix into the tin and squish down well with a spoon. Use the back of the spoon to flatten the surface
• In a large bowl mix together the sugar, cream and Philadelphia
• Stir in the zest and lime juice. Do this bit by bit so that the mixture doesn’t end up too loose
• Mash/puree the green flesh of two of the kiwis (could pass through a sieve but don’t lose the black seeds). Discard the white central part of the kiwi.
• Stir kiwis into the cream mix until all of it is well combined.
• Pour this mixture into the tin and flatten with a spoon.
• Chill in the fridge for two hours
• Remove and serve. A nice touch would be to arrange slices of fresh kiwi on the top

Puff pastry twists with rhubarb cream and sauce

Every now and again, as if by magic but more often by accident, I happen to create something that turns out to be utterly delicious. I had a bunch of rhubarb so thought I’d have a go at this Rhubarb tart which seemed fairly simple. As there are only 2 adults here and one little tot, I only made two tarts. The rest of the pastry was used to make puff pastry twists for the tot. Now, the tart is sitting in the oven and doesn’t look too promising though I’ll taste it in a bit to see. HOWEVER, the cream mix and rhubarb sauce (ever so amended and improved by me) turned out to be AMAZING, and tasted very good with the twists.

Ingredients:

For puff pastry twists:

• Jus rol all butter puff pastry pack
• 1 egg beaten in a bowl
• 1 tbs icing sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon powder

For the rhubarb sauce:

• 200 g fresh rhubarb washed, trimmed of horrid end bits, then cut into 2 cm pieces
• Juice of 1 large orange (fairtrade of course!)
• 2 tbs caster sugar

For rhubarb cream:

• 150ml double cream
• 2 tbs caster sugar
• Zest of 1 large orange

Cooking

The twists:

• Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees, 180 degrees for fan, gas mark 7
• It’s best to use puff pastry in a cold kitchen as it can quickly become unmanageable.
• Cut the pack into 6 parts to make it easier to roll out.
• Roll each portion out on a lightly floured surface until it is around 3 mm thick. Then cut these into thin strips
• Doing one strip at a time, pick up by both ends and lightly twist it. Place on the baking tray twisted.
• Once all the strips are done, I put them into the fridge for about 15 mins to make them keep their shape (not sure if this was necessary but it felt the thing to do)
• Remove from fridge, and light brush each strip with the egg wash.
• Cook in the centre of the oven until puffed up and golden brown (make sure the centres are cooked. Some of mine stayed raw as I was a bit too keen to eat them)
• Remove and allow to cool
• Once cool lightly sift over the icing sugar then the cinnamon powder.

Rhubarb sauce:

• While pastry is cooking, start on the sauce. Put the pieces of rhubarb, caster sugar and orange juice into a sauce pan and simmer until the fruit is soft. At this stage mash the fruit so that it’s all blended
• Let it reduce down a little to intensify the flavour, stirring frequently to prevent sticking
• Cook until it’s the consistency of jam
• Set aside to cook

Rhubarb cream:

• In a cold bowl, pour in the cream and sugar
• Whisk until it is thick and stands on peaks
• Now take 1 tbs of the rhubarb sauce and fold it into the cream to get a ripple effect

To serve

Serve the straws with a dollop of the cream and rhubarb sauce. Delicious!

Lemon drizzle cake

I’ve posted before about a Ramsay – Gordon who I find to be quite odious. However, while on the hunt for a lemon-y cake, I came across the Tana Ramsay Lemon Drizzle Cake which is simple and delicious and VEGETARIAN (hahahahaha seeing as her hubby is so anti-vegie). Perhaps she got the recipe by watching his sour face and wanting to push it into cake. Right that’s enough meanness. As my tot would say “I’m ONLY joking”.

Back to the recipe. I couldn’t quite follow the recipe as I only had three eggs (but they were large so maybe ok) and one lemon. Tot didn’t want to have a loaf like cake so I gave her some of the mixture to make fairy cakes and in the end my one lemon was sufficient in sourness for the remainder.  Once the fairy cakes were done (i.e. covered in icing and various sprinkles surrounding a solitary chocolate button) tot left me alone to drizzle away. Yesterday evening hubby and I ate half the thing…if we hadn’t had a big dinner I am quite sure that we would have eaten it all – light and lemony. Yum. Today it was a bit denser but very much edible. I thoroughly recommend this recipe.